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Re: What is understanding?


At 03:02 27/06/97 EDT, Ludwik wrote:
Students are expected to understand physics. But what is understanding?

One of the most useful general discussion of understand that I have come
across is in Edwina Rissland Michener's piece in Cognitive Science 2,
361-383 (1978) called "Understanding Understanding Mathematics". While it is
concered with math, I have found it useful for understanding Physics
understanding.

She includes:
1. Knowledge of items and relations
2. General strategies useful in physcis
3. Meta-knowledge that enables one to see patterns or examplars
4. Epistemological knowledge
5. Representational knowledge

It is state of mind, with respect to a topic or a set of topics.

I'm decreasingly happy with the idea that understanding is a 'state of
mind', and seeing it more useful to represent it as an evaluation that other
people make. This sounds more like what Greg is trying to get at when he said:

UNDERSTANDING is attended when a student can confront a novel situation
and validly discuss it (at length) with an expert.

That is, I cannot be said to 'undertand' until other people in the community
agree that I understand. In the classroom, the community is the teacher. We
can make some generalisations, like Michener does above, about what
constitutes understanding within a community. But, as psychologists have
long struggled with, its all but impossible to try to speak of 'states of mind'.



Dave Boote

"...schools are always the focal point of our attempts to understand and
resolve new conditions of culture." Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections
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